Missing Link Daily

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill

Politics

Australian

Terry Sedgwick commits the ultimate act of Photoshop self-abuse

2020 Roundup

Bernard Slattery found only one worthwhile idea in The Hun’s 2020 Summit-eve reporting and Harry Clarke concluded it was a show about nothing. Mark Bahnisch thought Jackie Huggins had the toughest panel to chair. Andrew Bolt put the tattered shreds of his sanity on the line by liveblogging the proceedings. Brian Bahnisch found that Kevin Rudd’s early childhood push reduced to human-capital formation. Sinclair Davidson believes its all a sign of Kevin Rudd’s lack of substance and inner Tony Blair. Chris Berg, Pommygranate and HeathG were unimpressed, with Heath noting that the (mostly unoriginal) ideas are the easy bit, implementing them is where we needed clever thinking. 

Now we’ll just finish up with a quick words from The Editor, Bridgid Gread, Jack Lacton, marcellous, broken left leg, Jim Belshaw, and Peter Timmins on governance group outcomes, then we’ll hand it all over to Jeremy to sum up the mood of the meeting.

Other

Andrew Landeryou indulges his inner Whitlamite by paying out on Malcolm Fraser, at his blog of high bandwidth consumption and poor Java scripting. ((Thereby completing the Malcolm-Fraser-pile-on trifecta, with solid efforts by Colebatch, Akerman and Landeryou.~gilmae))((Sounds more like Gladiators than horse-racing ~ GT))

Mercurius at LP notes the discovery of a Howard/Brough black hole((No relation to the Higgs boson ~GT)).
 
Sacha responds to assaults on property rights in favour of NSW developers. As does Terje although perhaps unsurprisingly for an ALS  blogger, Terje thinks the status quo and the new laws are just different shades of tyranny. ((And really, the NSW government bending over backwards to assist bribe-encumbered developers? What a shock.~gilmae)) clarencegirl is less polite than Quentin Dempster about NSW Planning Minister Frank Sartor.

International

Tim Lambert reports  further developments in the story of Brian Hansford, a journalist at the New Zealand Listener, who was fired after climate change zealots((Of the denialist variety ~GT)) used stand over tactics on the magazine’s editor and management. Now the Listener has sooled its solicitors on the blogger who posted an account of the affair:

When you use lawyers to suppress people’s views it kind of undercuts your claims that you didn’t suppress Hansford’s views.

PalMD of denialism blog((Hat tip to Tim Lambert ~GT)) sinks the slipper into the persecuted Christian majority and suggests that their apologists need a little more faith. 

Harry Clarke reports from a seminar on proposing to use “middle-class welfare” as development strategy for poorer nations.

Currency Lad on Pope Benedict’s visit to the United States.

Syrian bloggers lament the changing character of the old part of Damascus.

Japanese bloggers on About40, a hit show which targets “the late-thirties demographic of single childless Japanese women who entered the work force during the 80s bubble, captured in the newly-coined term arafo.”


shoes to die for

a friend of ours

Go then!

… came all this way to see you

Issues analysis

David Tiley posts on media shenanigans on both sides of the Tasman, with a detailed analysis of the standoff between editor and journos at The Age newspaper, provoked in part by Jaspan’s enthusiastic promotion of “Earth Day”, and a look at the seemingly sinister influence of well funded climate change denialists in New Zealand.

Mark Bahnisch found this article, by conservative historian Tony Judt a worthwhile read. In it Judt finds that the US has learnt very little from the history of the previous century.

David Jeffery thinks our pollies are off the planet when it comes to plastic bags. Nico is quite content that the plastic bag shindig during the week ended with no ban.

Dave Bath has found another community consultation you might want to write to.

dr. faustus is appreciative of mobile phone free zones that have sprung up.

Will Wilkinson is unimpressed by Sunstein and Thaler’s new book Nudge, which seems to tout the virtues of achieving social change through engineering “default options” and a range of other modes of choice architecture. ((Why are Americans so much better than everyone else at mental masturbation?~ KP)).

Robin Hanson muses about the nature of philosophers (and to an extent philosophy).


Arts

German film festival director Lynden Barber provides some details on Hans Weingartner’s new film Reclaim Your Brain, a film centering on a television producer attempts to rig the televisions ratings system to reverse the national idiocracy arising from TV networks determination to scrape the bottom of the barrel in the pursuit of maximising audience share. (SH – Weingartner may despair, but he has never encountered the banality that is Australian commercial free-to-air television). This film is bound to provoke as much comment as its predecessor The Edukators, which seemed to polarise audiences who were often unsettled by the ideological emptiness of the film’s main protagonists.

tigtog togs up and goes out for a night at the New York Metropolitan Opera (in Paddington). Prima La Musica on the same event, and “the strange fascination of Angela Gheorghiu.”

Matilda provides the shortlist for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, with a travail through Percy’s website offering review abstracts of each of the shortlisted texts. Matilda also provides the shortlist for the 2008 NSW Premiers’ Literary awards, with more detailed judging information available from the Arts NSW website.

Alison Croggon reviews Graham Pitts’s Haneef: The Interrogation, a play based upon the leaked police interviews of Indian-born doctor Mohamed Haneef, finding the playwright’s inability to “resist the temptation to proselytise,” inevitably undermining the dramatisation of an incident upon which so much compelling material was available.

Brian Howe talks to Colin Meloy, the front-man of Oregon folk/prog-rock ensemble the Decemberists.  

Very very behind on the goss, Geoffrey from Art of Distraction has been having a tricky time  lately and is compelled to tell almost all. I am already anticipating  In the Pink – Part 2.    

Aus Grind has details of a free Anti-Nazi compilation.

A pithy round-up of some of Melbourne theatre’s best and brightest in the Green Room Awards  accompanied by some good images at Morning After  and a more mysterious one at Mink Tails.


Sport

Round 3 of the V8 Supercars in Hamilton, NZ.


Snark, strangeness and charm

Say it now and say it loud: I’m a pig and I’m proud!

armagnac’d tells of his own success in imparting valuable social skills through early childhood intervention.

skepticlawyer files a report for Catallaxy’s Oxford University Bureau on trolling by the Oxford Union.

Harry Clarke gets attacked by one of the numerous noxious “adware selling anti-spyware” programs and is understandably peeved.

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Patrick
Patrick
16 years ago

7. KP: Why are Americans so much better than everyone else at mental masturbation?

Er, because you’ve already forgotten yes minister? Or maybe because you can only read English?

Patrick
Patrick
16 years ago

fair point – and I guess the French excuse is that they do it in French!

The real question is why we inevitably follow them!! I spend my life resisting stupid usage of language such as ‘circle back’, ‘get down out of the helicopter’, and God knows how many others.

Pavlov's Cat
16 years ago

I just made the mistake of looking at the Pig and now I have to go and have another shower.

skepticlawyer
16 years ago

‘I’d rather call you ‘minister’, Minister’ is one of my faves.

fairlane
16 years ago

Thanks for the link. You are too kind.

Is LE involved in this?

By the way, could one of you women pick up some beer on the way over? I’m a tad thir-sty.

Oink!

skepticlawyer
16 years ago

LE and I are taking a break at the moment, fairlane. We’ll no doubt be missing linking in the future, tho… the team members rotate as and when we have spare time.

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[…] Troppo’s Missing Link has a good round up of blogospheric commentary on the 2020 summit, and Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy […]

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[…] bloggers (from all political shades) were unimpressed. So why does the media love it so much?

Niall
16 years ago

Personally, I thought ‘Australia Talks’ tonight summed up the 2020 Summit thingie rather well. The single big idea to come from the gathering is the fact that it was held at all. Would John Howard have contemplated such an event, let alone the openness with which it was held? I think not.

Jason Soon (Bring back Homer Paxton)
Jason Soon (Bring back Homer Paxton)
16 years ago

Profound thoughts as usual, Niall. Ever thought of setting up a greeting cards business?

Nabakov
Nabakov
16 years ago

“The single big idea to come from the gathering is the fact that it was held at all.”

Really? I thought the single big idea was the idea you could have such an idea.

But not quite as a big idea as the idea that having such a big idea was big enough to have in the first place.

Nabakov
Nabakov
16 years ago

I think you get the idea Niall.

melaleuca
16 years ago

Niall,

You shouldn’t be so obsessed with size.